


the beast you've made of me

by cracktheglasses (cormallen)



Series: The Left Hand Path [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Side Rey, Disfigurement, Dubious Consent, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Knights of Ren - Freeform, Major Character Injury, a match made in Stockholm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 04:26:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6455773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cormallen/pseuds/cracktheglasses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years ago, Kylo Ren came to Jakku. He took a young girl with him when he left, to train with the Knights of Ren. She is his apprentice, his charge, and his greatest treasure. He has to -- he must -- become everything to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the beast you've made of me

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Howl by Florence + the Machine](https://g.co/kgs/UTBZO).
> 
> Thank you, [mythbusterposey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mythbusterposey/pseuds/mythbusterposey) and [Mster70](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Mster70/pseuds/Mster70), for helping me wrangle this, and [machinewithoutfeelings](http://machinewithoutfeelings.tumblr.com/), for listening to me whine about it when I was still calling it "the snake pit fic".

In the morning, Kylo isn’t in the north practice room. It is true that she is a few minutes early, but it is true for most mornings, and he is always there before her, cross-legged on the mat, the staves laid out ready in front of him. Today, the room is empty. The staves are still hung up in place on the far wall, the mats, unused, stacked in the corner, and Rey considers this for a few moments, counting her breaths to keep the time.

It could be a test, though the manner is unlikely. Kylo _is_ fond of tests, but usually with an objective in mind, even if one’s not always clear to her at the time. The canyon -- that had been difficult, but he had warned her to meet him there, and taken her down himself, winding the thick rope through the wheel on the lift’s side. She had been on her own from there, and he hadn’t been all too pleased with how long she had taken, though Rais had told her later, sharp-toothed smirk obvious even through the black lacquered panels of his mask, that she had beaten Nicca by hours. That had felt good, though she hadn’t dared say as much to Kylo; he would have made it known had he been impressed.

After she’s counted ninety seven breaths, she turns to go and almost bumps into Nicca, shirt off and vibroblade in hand; it is supposed to be dulled for practice, but Rey can see the light reflecting in slices off of the edge. It makes her uneasy, and more so when he smiles wide at her, tongue flicking out between his lips.

“Better watch it,” he says, still smiling that condescending smile. Rey knows better than to respond.

When she puts her palm on the panel outside Kylo’s door, it is slow to open, a long, shuddering moment when she thinks he’s locked her out of his room again. The panel finally clicks to green as the door mechanism engages with a raspy grind, and Rey lets out a short-lived breath of relief, suddenly loud in the dry, dusty silence of the hall.

He isn’t inside. He isn’t inside, and what’s worse, she can't feel him at all when she reaches out, a duracrete wall suddenly sprung between her and the familiar, flickering spot at the edge of her mind that is his.

He isn’t in the south training room, or the small, square chamber with the carved ceiling that serves as their mess, or the library with its four busted consoles, only two still drawing juice from the generator in the mountainside and suited for use. Rey checks the great hall, the ancient soldier’s head staring blankly at her from the floor; one marble ear has cracked off and lies in pieces. Someone has recently been at the mouth with a chisel, though for the life of her, Rey has no idea why. She circles the remnants of the pedestal where the soldier’s legs still remain, the ties of his sandals rendered in darker stone, and makes her way down to the inner courtyard, the mid-morning sun already painting it red.

Rais is on the bench, safely masked and hooded, dancing a piece of marble over the fingers of one gloved hand. He says nothing at her approach, though Alia turns from her perch at the top of the stairs, red eyes glinting in the light like a barghest’s.

“Looking for him, are you, girl?” she says, and Rey inclines her head, bends her shoulders as respectfully as she can.

“Yes, Lord Ren,” she says, and repeats the gesture to Rais. “Lord Ren.”

Rais makes a small noise behind his mask and stands; she doesn’t see his arm come up until the marble has launched in the air. Rais stops it the moment before it strikes Alia’s face. It hangs suspended between them until Alia reaches out a gloved hand and plucks it delicately, like one might a fruit.

Rais shrugs, and cocks his head at Rey; though Alia is taller and broader, it’s always Rais that scares her more. It’s stupid, and she knows it. He cannot help what’s under the mask any more than any of them can.

“What do you think,” he says, his voice dulled by the metal, “he dead yet?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alia replies. The left side of her mouth droops slightly when she talks; nerve damage or muscle damage, Rey doesn’t know. Maybe both. The scar, a greying pink, winds from the corner of her lip all the way up to her ear, bisecting the smooth, caf-brown cheek. “We’ll all feel it when it happens. Though I’m thinking, won’t be too long, now.”

The world ought to tilt, she thinks, but it doesn’t. “Lord Ren,” Rey says, and then the chunk of marble is flying at her, tossed by Alia’s careless hand. She snatches it out of the sunlight without thinking, a snap of the Force pulling it right into her grasp, and Alia nods, satisfied.

“Perhaps you should challenge Nicca for the right to train with Ordu, once it’s all over,” she says, jumping down to the ground. Even so, she still towers over Rey; as she closes the distance between them, the beads woven through her iron-grey hair jingle and clack together.

Rey feels it as it comes, Alia not bothering to conceal it, her heaving wrench into Rey’s mind. She yields to the intrusion, a long count of nineteen breaths, before Alia speaks with genuine surprise in her voice.

“You didn’t know. He didn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“Kylo thought to challenge Master Ren,” Rais says hoarsely behind her, and the world does tilt a little then.

“Pity, that,” she hears Alia intone, and sinks slowly to the ground.

The sharp gravel lining the yard digs immediately into the meat of her legs, her feet, still bare for practice. She tries, hard as she can, to zero in on the discomfort -- to draw it in, like Kylo’s been teaching her. To bring it close, to touch it from all sides, spin it backwards and forwards until every jagged angle is reflected, amplified, all the way through her core.

“Trust in it,” he had told her, his voice strangely gentle as they’d watched the blood well up on her arm, the skin hot and blistered where the blade had touched it. “If you can trust nothing else, you can always trust in pain,” he’d said, and the blood came faster, a steady thick trickle down to the tips of her fingers, heavy droplets landing muffled on the mat. She’d swayed, unsteady in her stance, and his hands had been there at once -- a heavy warm grip, adjusting the line of her shoulders, the bend of her knee. He hadn’t moved, of course, his actual hands still folded across his chest, but the phantom touch had braced her enough to give in to the pain a little more, the blood congealing, a muted red on the back of her wrist.

 _Pain is your friend_ , she repeats to herself, trying to summon up his voice. A piece of gravel has wedged itself, rough, between her toes. Where there is pain, there is life. Where there is pain, there is hope. An absence of pain can mean only one thing, and she reaches out desperately to the border of her thoughts, to the monolith wall, but it is no use; there is nothing there.

She clenches her hands into fists, letting her bitten nails edge roughly against her calloused palms. A tiny hurt, but a hurt all the same, and she adds it to the rest of her hoard, feeling the angles sharpen.

Kylo is not her friend. He is many things, Rey thinks with grim certainty, but friend isn’t one of them, and is unlikely ever to be. There was a moment, back on Jakku -- the count now in years ago instead of breaths -- when she’d let herself think he was family, though he’d dispelled the brief fantasy when he’d pulled back his hood. She hadn’t known how old he was, exactly; still doesn’t, much like she doesn’t know her own age in anything beyond an estimated guess, but she could tell he’d looked too young to be anything other than a stranger. When she’d examined her own face in the mirror later, she’d found no resemblance between them, though she is certain now that is no longer true.

She feels the ripple a few breaths before Vashe comes striding down the stairs, booted feet silent even as they disturb the gravelled floor. She is unarmed, which is strange, and unmasked, which is stranger still, but it is not Rey’s place to question.

“Where is Korin?” Alia calls to her, and the other Knight bares her teeth as her mouth stretches open. Her left incisor is chipped, and Rey thinks her lip may have gone a bit puffy, though she has little enough to compare it to; she can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’s seen Vashe with a bare face.

When she speaks, it’s like a grating gear caught against another with no oil in between; Rey cannot see under her collar, but she knows it is there, the thick, ropy line stretching from one ear to the other across Vashe’s small neck.

“Korin is taking advantage, of course,” Vashe rasps. “If you were planning on joining him, you should have done it sooner. Ordu is with him already, and what’s the point in not being first?”

“Better last than first today, hmm, sister?” Rais says; Rey hears the gravel shift and crunch as he moves.

“Maybe so,” Vashe replies, and holds her palms together. There’s a crackle of static, the sparks forming in between until they are too many to count, a snarl of blue fire nestled against her flesh. She nudges it up with the heel of her hand, lets it rise until it rests on her fingertips, and _flicks_ , sends the sparks dissipating once more until all that is left is a faint taste of ozone in the air.

Rey shouldn’t be here. Vashe’s games do not have the habit of ending well, though it’s Nicca who is usually the target. Rey pities him sometimes. He may be Ordu’s pupil, his creature, vicious and mean, but Kylo has never let anyone go at Rey the way Ordu allows, and she wonders, not for the first time, what would have happened if it had been one of them, instead. If it hadn’t been Kylo Ren that day, stranded in Niima, passing the time watching the child at the watering trough from underneath his tattered hood.

Kylo doesn’t like it when she talks like that.

“Don’t you see,” she can picture him perfectly, nostrils flared, eyes focused on her, dark and intense, like he is trying to stare a hole through her skull. “It was always supposed to be me, Rey. It couldn’t have been anyone else. It was never chance, or an accident, or luck.”

In that, he is right. No one would ever have called it luck.

Rey shouldn’t be here; she knows this. If Kylo -- if he is -- she finds she can’t quite shape the word, not even inside her head, the solid, final feel of it. But spoken or not, if it is true, she ought to be doing anything other than waiting here in the courtyard, watching the Knights test at each other like whip-snakes. If it’s true, she ought to run.

She has always been good at running; it had taken Kylo four days to catch up with her on Garel, and over a week on Nar Shaddaa. It could have been longer had she planned it ahead of time instead of making a break for it in the middle of the Corellian sector. Kylo had finally found her on one of the lower levels, hungry and feverish, trying to reprogram a garbage scow; she had bitten clean through the meat of his thumb trying to break loose.

On Dathomir, he’d tracked her in six days, and she’d followed him to the shuttle, sullen and silent.

She’d been gone for two weeks on Akiva before she’d given in and found him, first.

South is the only path open to her, here, and she doesn’t think she can make it on foot. North and east lie the mountains, and the valley beyond, a dead end, the enormous statues guarding the temple and the caved in mountain path. There are tuk’ata in the valley, a pack of them; she has seen the records in the library’s consoles, their spined skin and their fangs dripping with venomous slaver. They get closer sometimes, though they don’t venture too near; she has heard them when she’d climbed to the roof at night, howling and snapping at each other in their savage hunts.

There is a settlement up the mountainside, a base where the soldiers train in their white armor. It had been a spaceport once upon a time, Kylo had said, but it hasn’t been one for years and she has seen no shuttles take off from there since they’ve arrived. The other base is south through the canyon; it is where their supplies come from, delivered by droid. It is where new soldiers land, where their own ship had landed before Kylo had led them through the canyon for the first time. He hadn’t needed to tell her to stay close.

There are caves in the canyon, a long, twisted network of passages leading back to the valley and up to the mountaintop, some collapsed from disuse and the shifting of the planet’s red soil. Others, she shudders to recall, seemed deceptively clear until she’d turned a corner or disturbed a jut of rock on a rough wall. No, Rey decides; if she is to make it through the canyon yet again, she will need a better plan than simply running.

She is half considering trying to find a way to use Nicca when it hits her, sudden and vicious: _pain_. Pain unlike any she has ever known. Pain far beyond what she’s taken in training, what she’s had in a fight. It is as if a burst of fire is eating its way up her arm, a hundred knives prying apart the joint of her shoulder. It knocks the very breath from her lungs. She is struggling for it, gulping for air; she thinks she might be screaming but she cannot tell, her head full of jagged sharp noise --

\-- and then it’s gone as suddenly as it had begun, and Rey opens her tightly shut eyes, blinking away the red sunlight, and wishes immediately she hadn’t looked, though it is too late.

Rais is leaning over her, his mask on the ground beside him, the raised, puckered mess of scarred skin stretched over where his eyes should be. This is hardly the first time she’s seen him without his mask, but she doesn’t think she will ever find it less unnerving; she struggles to take his hand as it’s offered, biting down hard on her lip as Rais helps pull her up to her feet.

They’re all watching her, she realizes. She doesn’t know exactly how Rais does it, with his sight that isn’t sight, but Vashe and Alia have moved in close, Alia’s hand resting on the handle of the vibroknife at her hip.

“It’s Korin,” Alia mutters, “It has to be,” but Rais has gone still at her side, mouth open, the tip of his tongue resting on his pocked bottom lip, as if tasting the air.

“It’s done,” he says finally, pulling back. “Master Ren is coming.”

Rey stands stock-still, aware of each piece of rock under the soles of her feet.

That day in Niima, Kylo Ren hadn’t told her his name. He had noticed her, he’d told her later, a small, rawboned girl dragging her bag of rattling parts behind her. A droid’s motivator, three ammo packs for a blaster model she hadn’t seen before, a bundle of wires she had dug out of the navicomputer of a ship revealed by a recent sandstorm. The desert moved, on Jakku, stretched out and contracted like the tides of a dead sea, like a ribcage shifting with the breath of the storms. What was there one day could be gone the next, swallowed up by the sands, but they had parted for her that morning, letting her climb into the Y-wing’s belly, still largely untouched. She hadn’t expected a week’s worth of food for her finds, but they were supposed to have been worth more than what Plutt had offered -- a quarter portion and a handful of spark sticks for her cookfire.

She’d retreated to the watering hole, teeth clamped down on her lower lip to stifle her prickling eyes, hands shaking with the bitter unfairness of it all. It had been their fault, the armored men tending to the ship beyond the gates, the snub nose and pointed sides plated in unfamiliar dull grey metal; there would be credits to have from them, for Plutt, credits and fuel and ammo and maybe more, all for a spot of simple repairs he had been all too happy to provide. They would be gone, then, leaving her with her worthless wires, the strap of her bag clutched tight to her side, and she’d _hated_ them, drinking her water from the grimy trough, refilling her flask and her backup jug. They would be gone, uncaring and unaware of the scales they had shifted, and she had glared at the ship’s scuffed grey side, at the soldiers milling about with Plutt’s two mechanics, at the man, hooded and dressed in black, sitting cross-legged on the rock nearby.

She had wanted, so desperately, for something to happen then to make them feel it -- for a sinkhole to open up under the soldiers’ feet, like it happened too often out in the Badlands, or for the fuel cells to catch flame. For a pack of gnaw-jaws to howl through the outpost, leaving chaos in their wake. None of those would kill them, of course; the men had been armed well-enough against gnaw-jaw teeth, and fuel cells could be replaced -- eventually. She hadn’t wanted them dead, anyway; death taught one nothing. Death was no lesson for soldiers, hired to kill or be killed in return; all she had wanted was for them to see, to taste, to _know_ , as she had -- the gnawing, dusty, hot desperation named Jakku, the sand gathering around her feet in hot rivulets, the air, swirling, thick, tasting of ozone in her mouth. The water in the trough, roiling, a sudden tide, sending the luggabeast stepping backwards with a discomfited whine.

The hooded man had been gone from the rock. She had not noticed him move.

“You are wrong, girl,” Kylo Ren had told her, many hundreds of breaths later, crouched in front of her in the ship’s cramped cabin. “Death _is_ a lesson. Someday, you’ll see.”

 _No_ , she begs, _no_ , _please_ , _not yet_ , as Rais goes to his knees to her left. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Vashe do the same, though Alia Ren remains standing, knuckles taut on the vibroknife in her hand. Rey wishes she had the courage -- the gall -- to do the same, but all she can do is keep feeling the sting in her flesh, the ache in her feet, the ache in her chest -- as she waits for the black-swathed figure to make it through the doors.

Ordu’s mask is cracked in half, the edges of the gaping plasteel wound slicked with gore; he staggers down the steps as if drugged, one hard-won step, then another, before his legs suddenly give out. His great big body crumples, landing hard in the gravel, the mask sliding off his face; Alia is on him so quickly Rey barely sees her move, a dark blur resolving at his side, knife clattering down useless, her hands feeling for a beat in his chest.

Rey reaches a tendril of her mind out to him, and meets nothing, a void in the Force where there had once been the shape of a man. Ordu is dead, and she holds her breath at what it means, holds it until her lungs burn and Kylo enters into the courtyard, black cloak pulled tight around him like a shroud.

“Master Ren,” Rais says reverently, lifting up his scarred, eyeless face.

“Master Ren,” Vashe echoes in her deep rasp as Kylo crosses the distance between them, his booted feet almost touching Ordu’s bent arm.

Rey still can’t feel him; even as he stands there, almost close enough to touch. His mind is walled off from hers, and all she can taste is the slight crackling residue of energy, the feverish strength left over in him from the battle.

Alia replaces the cracked mask back on Ordu’s face; a trickle of blood has oozed out of his ear, staining his long blond braid and the mottled skin of his neck. She runs a finger down the dirtied strands and looks up at Kylo, the edge of her mouth twitching.

“Korin,” she says.

“May yet live,” Kylo replies, “if he can crawl out of the pit.”

“Master Ren,” Alia nods, and shifts to her knees, hands out in front of her, palms tilted up in supplication.

Rey doesn’t kneel. She cannot reach him, but even so, she can tell; there is something horribly wrong with Kylo. Something other than the bloodied gash on his face, something hidden behind the block he’s put up against their bond, something covered in the folds of his heavy, tightly wound cloak. This close, she can see the vein pulsing in his temple, beads of grimy sweat dotting his forehead, and she waits for something to else happen, some further explanation, some instruction she must now follow.

He says nothing, or else, nothing that she can hear. One by one, the three Knights stand, bow to their master and exit the courtyard. She catalogs the movements out of the corner of her eye, a cautious, deep-held habit, but doesn’t watch them go, not when Kylo is breathing too fast, short, shallow draws, and Rey’s heart knocks anxiously into her ribs. Her throat feels tight, her cheeks hot. She stares at him, forcing herself to stand perfectly still despite the thumping, fluttering call inside her chest to launch herself at him, to peel aside the scratchy, stifling weight of his cloak until she’s laid him open, reached all the way underneath to whatever it conceals.

“Rey,” he says finally, the tip of his tongue darting out over the crust of blood on his lower lip; he looks impossibly tired as he gestures them towards the dormitory wing with a slight nod of his head.

Rey follows.

Kylo stumbles as they enter the south hallway, sets himself right with a jerk, and stumbles again. A twisting dizziness curls through Rey’s skull for a moment, sending her staggering after him; when they reach his room, she slaps her hand against the panel and wills it to click open, quickly, _quickly_ , stepping aside to let him through.

He collapses on his pallet the moment the door slides closed behind them, the heavy cloak coming loose from his shoulders. She sees it then, her gorge rising bitter in her throat.

Kylo’s left arm is gone.

The tattered, burnt sleeve ends suddenly, far above where it should. In the dim overhead light, it looks like it might have been a clean, quick cut, at least; a single sweep of a saber instantly cauterizing the severed flesh right above the elbow joint. There is another, smaller burn on his shoulder, and though his cheek looks ghastly, the blood clotting, dark and thick, the wound there isn’t very deep. Not too much worse than a graze, though she needs more light to make certain.

His presence ebbs and rises in her mind, like the shifting sands of the Badlands; a sweep of nausea, a hot scorching hurt before it’s gone, and Rey bites at the inside of her cheek, keeping the words inside. She wants to tell him that he can let go of the block, that he can let her in. That she can handle it, the remnants of his red-hot rage and the sweltering pain both, that she can split them with him, just like he’s always wanted.

She doesn’t. She tongues at the bite instead, a perfect little ache, and fetches the glowlight from the basket, water from the jug, and kneels down beside him to inspect the rest of the damage.

His shirt won’t come off as is; Kylo shifts reluctantly on the thin mattress, too heavy for her to move enough to pull the shirt up over his head. She calls one of the knives down from the wall, the heft of the hilt sliding, familiar, into her grasp, and slices the cloth from him with a practiced hand. Most of it, singed and bloodied, is a waste, but she sets the cleanest of the scraps aside in case they’re needed later. She has to pull his boots loose before she can manage his trousers; he works with her on those, lifting his hips with an ill-disguised grimace.

His legs are fine, but his side looks a mess. Rey uses what’s left of his clothes to mop up the blood and follows it up with the water, ignoring the hissing groan he lets out when she prods too hard, his eyes sliding closed. The block between them has thinned out a little more by the time she is done; the worst of his twinges are leeching through, into her own left arm, into the spare flesh of her belly.

“Kylo, you need a medic,” she tells him, replacing the glowlight on the floor, and his eyes flutter open, dark lashes smudging up from the pale cheek.

“Master Ren,” he corrects, slurring only a little; she sees red on his teeth as he speaks. “Get the kit from the locker -- there should be enough bacta in there still.”

“Kylo,” she says again, deliberately ignoring the appellation, “Kylo, please,” but he rolls his head on the pillow, side to side. His mutilated arm is tucked in against his ribs. Rey feels it again as she gets up to retrieve the med kit, like a splatter of acid through the bond between them, and has to put a hand against the locker to steady herself on her feet.

There is enough liquid bacta left for her to spread on his face and the burn on his shoulder; she rips apart a drip pack to slather his side, and covers it up with an analgesic patch. The final pack and another pain patch go onto the stump of his arm; she binds it up with the strips of his shirt and replaces what’s left of the kit back on the shelf. She moves the remaining water jug close enough for him to reach, even though she knows it isn’t necessary, and watches him settle on his uninjured side before she flicks the glowlight and the overhead off.

In the dark with her back against the wall, she waits and counts, her breaths, and his.

Ten breaths. Twenty. Thirty five. Aside from the heavy exhales of air, Kylo is silent, and she moves carefully on the fortieth breath, small steps forward until she feels the edge of the mattress with her bare feet.

He knows she is still there, of course, but he hasn’t yet told her to leave, and Rey waits, her pulse thrumming in her wrists, at the base of her throat. Kylo’s breathing has evened out, the raspy hitch from earlier gone; the painkillers must be doing their job, and Rey lowers herself to her knees, crawls over the last of the space separating the two of them.

Kylo doesn’t move as she sidles up to his back, lays her head against a sharp shoulder blade. Still, she waits before wrapping a tentative arm around his side, careful that her fingers don’t brush at the edges of the freshly applied bandage. Through the too-hot press of her cheek to his skin, she can feel the slight shift, the faint thump of his heartbeat; she closes her eyes and lets herself drift at the edge of consciousness, where the tendrils of her are pushing slowly, but certainly, through his wall.

There is no chrono in the cramped, windowless room, but when she wakes, Rey knows it must have only been a few hours. Kylo has turned himself around in sleep, his front pressed up against her, and his arm -- his remaining arm -- is draped loosely over her waist, his fingers resting over her hipbone. She can smell the bacta, mixed bitter and metallic with the scent of his sweat, the slightly sour tang of blood underneath; he needs more than a quick wipedown with a wet cloth to cleanse him of it. Rey eels halfway out of his grip and feels for the glowlight where she’d left it on the floor; in its faint blue tint, she stares at the wrapped stump of his other arm, at the color above the edge of the bandage. It feels too warm under the sweep of her hand, but there isn’t much swelling; with the way the wound’s been cauterized and with the quick application of the medicine, it’s very possible he’ll avoid infection. She thinks of the medical staff, the extra supplies at the troopers’ base; it would be best if he could get there as soon as is possible. He has to be planning to do something; victorious or not, he can’t go on as Master Ren diminished so. The other Knights will not -- _should not_ \-- allow it for long.

She folds herself back down the mattress, under the protective hold of Kylo’s arm, and stares up at his face, his eyes closed, ashen circles in the hollows underneath. The cut on his cheek, at least, will heal cleanly; she wonders which one of them has given it to him, Ordu or the late Master Ren. It can’t have been one of Korin’s venom-edged blades; his favorite poisons are all meant to work quickly.

A stray strand of hair has tracked across Kylo’s face; she stretches and tucks it back behind an ear, keeping it away from the cut. Once, early on after Garel when she had still worn her hair childishly long, he’d braided it for her into two thick, elaborate loops at her crown. She had sat still for him, too anxious and afraid to do anything else, waiting for him to drop the pretense, to dole out the punishment she’d earned, but he’d just combed his fingers through, untangling and reweaving the knots, his gloveless fingers soothing against her scalp. He’d leaned back and surveyed his handiwork, frowning, brows drawn; she hadn’t yet known, then, how to slide up at his borders, to push in, to feel for the thread of a stray thought that would have made it clear. She could only tell he hadn’t liked the results after all, and he hadn’t attempted it again. Soon after that, when they’d begun training in earnest, she’d cut it up to her chin anyway with a knife-blade she’d kept in her boot. It had come out shorter on the right than the left, but she hadn’t asked for his help to fix it.

She still keeps her hair short; it is practical, though it’s been some time since she’s hacked at it with no mirror. It’s a neat, careful trim; Rey likes the way the geometric, severe lines frame her face. It puts her in mind of the similar lines of the Knights’ masks, crafted with sleek precision, though she remembers sometimes the heavy weight of it on her nape when it had been long, the way it had been tied back for her into knots, bound up with twists of ribbon. If she thinks harder, she isn’t sure if there had been ribbon, after all; it’s unlikely that she’d had, back on Jakku, something quite so frivolous as ribbons for her hair.

It’s harder, as time passes, to remember Jakku as clearly as she once had. She recalls the heat, the stinging sand, the pain, the hunger and thirst, but they feel sometimes removed, smudged, as if they had happened to another Rey. A Rey nobody had come for. She reaches quickly down her side and feels for Kylo’s fingers, stretched now over her thigh. The palm of it, his sword hand, is rough and slightly calloused, the pulse beating under her touch; she feels the line of his thumb, the thick knuckle, the smooth nail bed. The wrong hand, not the one she’d scored with her teeth; it’s a strange feeling, knowing she’ll never again touch that scar. She circles the pad of his thumb with her finger, the spot mirroring where it should have been, and wiggles her hips closer, until she is almost riding his thigh. She nudges his calf with her foot and pushes her toes underneath, tangling their legs together, and Kylo’s eyes blink groggily open.

He lifts his head from the pillow and blinks again, frowns, mouth crooking, as if remembering something.

“Stop squirming,” he tells her, voice rough from pain and sleep. “And put that light out.”

She obeys without argument, the room back to a thick, smothering darkness, and then Kylo’s hand is sliding back up over her hip, his fingers dragging, warm, over her hipbone where it edges out of her trousers. Her heart thuds as he traces around it, like he’s drawing a picture on her skin, and then he’s moving higher, over the curve of her waist, dipping under the hem of her shirt to touch her side, her belly. She draws in a sudden breath as he settles finally above her navel, kneads lightly at the muscle there.

“You should increase your rations. I can feel your ribs,” he murmurs, low, and his hand goes still, a hot brand against her already hot, too-tight skin.

He doesn’t move at all for several long moments after that; if she didn’t know better, she might think he’s fallen back into sleep, but Rey’s long since learned to tell the difference between Kylo at rest and Kylo pretending. The almost imperceptible, not-quite-twitch of his palm on her, tentative, almost hesitant; testing.

It’s maddening, what this simple press of his hand does to her almost at once, a familiar, long-conditioned response that sends her thighs clenching together tightly, the fabric of her trousers bunching thickly in between. Immediately, she wants to move, to have more. To rock her hips against his heavy thigh, pushing the trouser seam almost painfully into her. To grab hold of Kylo’s hand and drag it forcefully, without a care for his many hurts, to where she needs it.

He’ll stop, if she does. What she’s done already is almost too much, and Rey forces herself to go perfectly still, like one of the temple statues in the valley, silent and unmoving; her arms, her chest are prickling, going gooseflesh, even in the stifling, windowless heat of the room, under her layer of clothes. She is tense, taut up against him as he finally begins tracing another circle over her belly, tall, wide, catching the underside of one small breast. Rey’s shirt shifts with his hand, the rough cloth whispering over her nipples, and she is glad for the darkness then, so he can’t see her face flooding hot and red.

He knows it anyway; flickers of her feed through to his mind from hers and back, a closed loop between them that still strains against the remnants of the block. Rey has touched many minds, both willing and unwilling, under his tutelage, but none quite so naturally, so rightfully as his, and the mental wall feels like more of a denial than any words he could ever shape with his mouth. Until he takes his hand away.

 _No_ , she pushes between them, but she can feel him shifting next to her; he groans as he moves, knees and thighs straining at the mattress, unlacing from hers. She feels him sit up, and then he is tugging lightly on the hem of her shirt, followed by a quick tap on her shoulder. It takes her a moment to understand what he wants before she lifts her arms over her head, relieved, and pulls the shirt off, letting the air hit her bare chest.

She sees the faint shape of him, eyes getting used to the darkness; he is leaning heavily on his good arm as he resettles himself, and then his hair is brushing over her shoulder as he bends down close, and presses his hot, soft mouth to her breast.

Rey’s chest is small; she doesn’t usually bother with a breastband, unless she’s working on hand to hand or heavy weapons training. She doesn’t really think about it most of the time; her body is a knife, a tool for honing, not the pampered shape of some Inner Rim pleasure girl, but she wonders if Kylo would like it better if she were softer, rounder, not the sharp-edged, knees-and-elbows thing that she is. His breath tickles lightly at her skin, sending little sparks through the block, and she can’t help a desperate sigh escaping her mouth as he closes his lips tightly around her nipple and sucks. It’s too hard; it almost hurts, the rush of blood to the surface. She can feel it swell in his mouth, go pebble-hard as he keeps worrying at it, a slight scrape of his teeth following his lips. A shudder of uncontrollable, shameful want jolts down her spine when he soothes the tiny ache with his tongue.

He mouths his way across her ribs, and Rey is trembling by the time he’s reached her other breast; she chokes back a whine in her throat as he ignores the peaked, swollen nipple and sweeps his tongue to the top of her breast, instead. He licks lightly at the thin, tender skin there for a moment, and then bites down, hard, rolls the swell of it between his teeth, until she can’t stand it. She will be bruised come morning if she isn’t already, marked with the print of Kylo’s lips, and she can’t help arching her back a little, pressing into him, squirming, panting helplessly into the top of his head.

Her trousers are thin, breathable fabric, made for training; she thinks she might as well be wearing nothing at all with the way they pull between her thighs, stretched tight. She is a slick mess there, each little push of her hips spreading the wetness all over the cloth. If the room were brighter, he could see it, she thinks, the way the soaked fabric outlines her folds. Even now he can probably feel it, one of his knees so torturously close to where the seam of the pants is cutting right up into her center, almost too hard to be anything other than outright pain, and another swell of shame rises up in the pit of her belly, mixing headily with her arousal. The first time she had gotten wet like this, wet for him, she had wanted to die, to burn up with the embarrassment of it. Curled up into his side, she’d hidden her face in the crook of his armpit, trying not to listen to the horrible, messy sounds his fingers had made stroking deep into her, at the gush of juices as he’d twisted his thumb on the outside, rubbing at a spot that had made her whole body coil tight.

It isn’t supposed to be like this between them. No one has said it, and she doesn’t think the rest of the Knights have an iota of concern for what he chooses to teach her, but she knows Kylo thinks far too much about the things he is meant to be to her, and he is certain -- almost certain -- wavering -- on whether this ought to be one of them. She can feel it sometimes, leeching across their connection, when he pulls her close in the dark; a spike of anger twined through with guilt before he extinguishes it in her, sucks it into the purple bruises he leaves on her flesh along with the marks of her training.

He never allows her to touch him back. After that first time, it had been months before he’d let her sleep in his room again, until the day Nicca had beaten her at the bo and she had slunk away, defeated, aching. Kylo had found her in the dead-end passage off of the east wing, where the ancient columns had collapsed, blocking the way; she had sat there, fiddling at the red crumble of stone, nursing her bruises and her angry pride, until he had told her she hadn’t done as poorly as that.

“Your cross-strike could be better; true. And your overhead block. But he has a lot of practice on you, and you are fast. You are sharper,” he’d said when she’d followed him back to his quarters; he’d put ointment on her face and her knuckles, promising her Nicca wouldn’t beat her again. She’d felt it then, as his fingers spread the pungent cream on her tender, swollen jaw: a faint, wavering thread of want on the brink of her mind. She had pulled at it -- curious, determined, coaxing it up to the surface, winding and tugging until the tube of medicine clattered to the floor and Kylo was heavy on her, one large hand wedged up against her mouth. The other, still trailing the sticky balm, was sliding into the waistband of her leggings, making her gasp, stifled and humid, into his broad palm.

She shoves her own fist into her mouth now, knuckles knocking awkwardly into her teeth, the keen edges digging into her own skin as Kylo palms at her through her trousers, his fingers pushing the seam into sensitive skin. He lets the edge of his hand slide unerringly down the center of her, spreading her apart under the cloth, and her stomach pulls with a twisted mixture of desire and dread, another pulse of wetness coating her lips.

Kylo pulls back then, and taps on the insides of her thighs, making room for her to shimmy the pants down her skinny hips. Rey pulls at them hastily with trembling, disobedient hands and then kicks them all the way off, hooking one ankle around the other. The once-muggy air of the room feels suddenly cool on all her exposed skin; she is bared to him, spread open, shivering with anxious anticipation. A rasp of pain judders up her side, scrapes up into her shoulder as Kylo moves, blistering through the connection between them, and then his fingers are sliding inside her, and Rey loses track of everything after that. The smell of his sweat, his blood, his burned, ruined flesh, the sudden prickly slide of his hair over her cheek, the weight of him on her, pinning her down to the mattress. Her breath is catching over and over in her throat as he rocks his hand in and out of her, rubbing her with it in rough little thrusts. She can feel herself pulsing, clamping down on him, her slick trailing over his fingers, soaking his palm, and bites at her own hand stuffed between her teeth, trying to push herself down onto his hand, trying to get his fingers deeper.

 _Please_ , she sends at him, _please_ , _please_ ; she doesn’t even understand what she is asking, but he knows it, fingers crooking, pressing into the spot that makes her shake. She slams her hips down onto his hand, clenching around him in violent, wracking spasms, and feels it all come crashing down at her at once, no more barrier between them, everything he has been keeping out jolting into her like a thunderwave, like lightning from his fingertips. She can sense everything: the texture of the healing laceration on his cheek as it presses against her chest, rough and sticky with bacta, and the pulling ache when she tilts up, the edge of it catching on her skin. The slippery, hot pull of her own body as he slips his hand away, his knee bracing into the mattress. His own arousal, heavy and hot, and the urgent, fiery tremor of pain rolling through his shoulder, through what remains of his arm. It’s all too much, and Rey sobs loudly, brings her hand up to palm helplessly at the top of her ribcage, her collarbone, the base of her throat, like she is trying to keep her heart from jumping out of her chest.

After a few moments, she’s biting at her lip to steady herself, and the overwhelming, immense presence of Kylo has receded, settled back into its usual spot at the fringe of her mind. She takes a few, gulping deep breaths, too erratic still to try to count, but the sudden flick of the glowlight on sends her eyes squeezing shut.

She blinks dizzily, trying to focus. Kylo is sitting at the top of the pallet, leaned heavily back against the wall, legs stretched out. He’s set the lamp on the floor, but it still feels too bright as she watches him from under her lashes. There is a bit of blood staining through the bandage wrapping his side; it will probably need to be redone, soon, though Kylo doesn’t seem to be paying it any mind. She watches, transfixed, as he trails his hand down the hard, angled plane of his stomach, below the bandage, and lower still.

She sits up. On unsteady, rubbery legs she moves, puts her hand, hesitant, testing, above his knee, and waits. One breath, two. Five. Seven.

He doesn’t tell her to go.

Later, under the heavy press of Kylo’s arm, she sleeps; in the morning, he is up and gone already by the time she has awoken. After she swallows down her rations in the mess, she is summoned to him in Master Ren’s quarters.

The room isn’t much larger than the rest of the Knights’ berths; there is a locker and a table and a bed with a low, metal frame in the corner, but the mattress on it looks much like the one from the floor of Kylo’s room, if a bit wider. There is, however, a small round window carved into the high stone wall, almost all the way to the ceiling; a streak of light feeds through, landing on the floor in curved, broken up slices. It hits the top of Kylo’s good shoulder as he sits cross-legged on the floor, wrapped once again in his cloak. There is a fresh strip of bacta patch applied to his face, and his hair has been pulled back into a knot; it looks clean, washed, and she wonders if it’s something he managed to do by himself. He must have; she can’t imagine Rais or Vashe tending to him so -- though, she supposes, he would be within his rights to ask it.

Alia walks in as he gestures for Rey to sit; Rey watches her out of the corner of her eye and settles down, mirroring Kylo’s position.

“Everything has been prepared,” Alia says, adding “Master Ren” almost as an afterthought as she pulls at her glove, the synthleather sleek and shiny; it looks new, not yet broken in.

Kylo dismisses her with a nod of his head, and waits for the door panel to chirp closed behind her before he speaks.

“I will be going off-planet for some time. There are things I would have you do, while I’m away.”

“I won’t be going with you?” she asks, trying to keep her composure; he can sense her feelings, but that is no reason to let them bloom on her face, unrestrained.

“No. I must see Leader Snoke,” Kylo says, offering no further explanation, and Rey ponders this a moment with an uneasy twinge. It is sometimes hard to reconcile this Kylo, the Kylo who gives her orders, with the man who teaches her how to strip a blaster rifle, how to best disarm an opponent twice her size, the one who wraps her wounds and lets her wrap his. With the comforting presence in her mind. It’s harder still to remember, sometimes, that Kylo Ren has another master to answer to.

The Knights keep mostly together, when they train, when they rest. Their world seems smaller to Rey -- more removed, sometimes, than even Jakku had been. Yet, there are soldiers on the mountainside, and soldiers at the canyon mouth; they will obey Master Ren, but he does not command them. Shuttles come and shuttles go; they send supplies, and venture sometimes into the valley, and they dig, and they train, but they do not train like the Knights. They do not share much with the Knights, in fact, other than the harsh red surface of the planet, and the man that has sent them here.

“I have something for you,” Kylo says suddenly, rising up off of the floor; she notices the movement is surprisingly smooth, Kylo bolstering himself with the Force where the flesh now lacks. She follows him across the floor, kneeling down as he throws open a small carved chest, old, wooden, not a metal or plasteel lockbox.

“You will need it,” Kylo says, holding the lightsaber hilt out to her. “For what you will have to face. Before you are ready to construct your own.”

Awed, Rey reaches out a tentative hand; as her fingers land on the cold metal, something ripples across Kylo’s face, quick and then gone, sparking still at the edge of their bond, like there is something else he wants to say, but doesn’t.

“Thank you, Master Ren,” she tells him, holding the lightsaber reverently between her palms. His face twinges again, the plaster of bacta pulling at the skin. “I will take care with it,” she adds, and feels the spark in her mind grow.

That night, she climbs up to the temple roof, shivering slightly in the chilled air. The red rocks of the mountain and the canyon sands cool quickly when the sun goes down, and Rey rubs at her arms, getting the blood moving, as she watches the first of the seven moons rise slowly above the distant horizon, rose gold against the black curtain of sky.

In the valley below, the tuk’ata howl and clash jaws in their endless dance of hunting, fighting and mating; the second moon sweeps its pale light over the top of the weathered great pyramid they guard, where Rey must soon enter.

She draws the lightsaber, feeling the worn metal grip warm in her hands, lets her thumb hover over the the activation switch for a long moment before she presses down. The blade ignites with an electric hum, a fluttering whisper that tremors from her hand through her whole body, from toes to crown. She regards it for what feels like hours, its light, brilliant blue, before she switches it back off.

Back in her dark, windowless room, she settles on her narrow mattress, her dreams strange and unsettling. She doesn’t remember most of them, only scraps, except for the one she has closest to waking.

In the dream, Rey is small. Her hair is bound up into knots at her crown, at the base of her skull, at her nape, long, the way it hasn’t been in any recent memory. It feels hot, stifling, unlike the short, utilitarian cut she is used to, and she squirms uncomfortably against Kylo’s chest as she looks up at him, the charred, ragged edges of his cloak billowing out around them like the wings of a najoon. He grins with bloodied teeth and lets go, the scar pulling taut in his face; Rey falls up, the world tilting around her, the blue sky, the brilliant golden sun suddenly whooshing close by, almost within her reach. She stretches out her fingers for it, crying out as Kylo catches her in both arms and sets her down in the courtyard, the gravel digging sharply into her naked back. Behind him looms a shadow -- massive, enormous, like one of the ancient statues guarding the valley tombs. It has no face but black smoke, tendrils of it curling off, weaving their way around Kylo’s arms, his torso, his wide-planted feet. A long, thick sweep of it angles at her, like it’s tilting its head; it’s seen her, she understands wildly, trying to scrabble her way back across the treacherous floor. It fixes her with its eyeless, ever-shifting face, like it’s trying to sense its way deep into her, and in front of it, Kylo is putting on his mask, the faceplate sliding down over his features, black and gleaming, like the void of space.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to poke me on [Tumblr](http://cracktheglasses.tumblr.com/), as usual.


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